


You Could Have A Heart Attack

by KriegsaffeNo9



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blasphemy, Blood, Blood Drinking, Body Horror, Gen, Horror, Inspired by Music, Isolation, Mystery, Psychological Horror, Slut Shaming, The next tags are spoilers!, Uncomfortable Sexual Overtones Without Actual Sex, We're talking hard blasphemy here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-23
Updated: 2019-10-23
Packaged: 2020-12-28 22:07:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21143987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KriegsaffeNo9/pseuds/KriegsaffeNo9
Summary: After the end of the world is narrowly averted, Entrapta finds herself in a small room in the Fright Zone with a bed, a table, and a locked door.  She's not feeling too hot.  What's going on, and why is she sleeping so damn much?That's not the real title of the story up there.A horror story.





	You Could Have A Heart Attack

_Did you rise from the earth?_

_Did you fall from the sky?_

\--The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets

* * *

First, she had discovered that her and Hordak's plan to open a portal would doom Etheria to a hideous death. Then Catra gave her a good, solid tasering when she tried to warn Hordak about the hideous death thing. Then she lived an entire lifetime in a world that was maybe perfect except for all the ways in which it wasn't, and she spent it more alone than she had ever been in her first life because she knew she had friends elsewhere and they weren't here and they would never be here because their lives were more perfect without her.

And then something happened she didn't clearly remember, and now she was here.

The room was shaped like the old rumpus room she shared with Scorpia and Catra, in that it was a large rectangle filled with stuff. They probably had lots of those in the Fright Zone, so that didn't narrow anything down. This one had a bed she could sleep in, no windows, a few books, and a door that was bolted shut except for two little slits, one higher up so that a person of average height could peek in on what she was doing, and one along the bottom that would, she guess, let someone slip in a tray or a stack of papers or a tablet or other flattish rectangular whatsit without having to open the door or look her in the eye.

So maybe a prison.

On the first day she was in the room--she vaguely felt like it was the first--she had woken up in the bed feeling like her entire body was made of cracked biscotti, then put her head back down on the pillow and gone back to sleep. She woke up the next day feeling a little less brittle and a little less dry, but not much better. Also, somehow her hair had gotten free of its ponytails.  
Controlling them as two limbs was easy. She could do it without practice the moment she had first done it at the tender age of six. Controlling two ponytails was like moving two hands. Controlling her hair when it was down was like moving a cape, a big, heavy, floppy one that was made of millions of tiny little independently-acting fibers. After a few furious, frustrated minutes trying to do so she went back to sleep.

So that was three days accounted for.

She had a vague feeling like when she woke up, there were more things in the room, but she hadn't taken a picture or committed things to memory or anything, so on one day when she felt like getting out of bed, she did so, and looked around, and found a desk with some random sciencey geejaws and her tape recorder and a pencil and a real live paper journal and a pencil sharpener and a little plastic tray to catch pencil shavings.

She hated pencils, and wasn't too fond of pens, but she made do, because looking at the recorder made her feel a kind of dread she had no name for. It was a feeling like looking at a land mine with a brick on it. She could take the brick off, and she'd find out what it would be like to have her face right next to an exploding land mine.

"Mystery journal," she said, and flinched; her throat felt pinched from the inside. So she just mouthed the words: "Mystery journal, day 1 of recording, not day 1 of occupation. I am going to write down everything I see and try and put together where I am, because this is just ridiculous. Also I will look for elastic bands to sort out my hair. And maybe some soap if I feel like I should have cleaned myself." She looked around. "I see no spouts or fountains or sinks. I also don't feel how I usually feel before my ablution drones show up, so maybe this is more like hour 1 of recording.

"Let's stick to 'day 1.' I can just add them on to my journal when I feel like it."

Day 1 turned up: the bed, desk, geejaws, real journal (dangerous), temp journal (less dangerous), walls, floor, door.

She felt accomplished. She found no elastic bands or things that would let her gather her hair more permanently, so she made do by pinching her hair off by hand and commanding them function. It was easier but not by much, especially since she had so much hair even bundling it up by the roots was difficult with her hands.

Her ungloved hands.

She realized that she was feeling every little hair with bare skin. She had touched the rough, pebbly texture of old wood and felt the coarse rustle of paper under her elbows, And it took until now to realize, not immediately.

She sat there on her bed, hands holding her own hair, feeling the individual strands writhe and squiggle like so many faintly slippery, faintly scaly wormfish, and she did not have to fight the urge to scream or cry.

She let go of her hair and looked at her hands, back and forth. The nails were trim. The skin just a little bit ghostlier than her already pale bodyskin. She was ungloved. This should not be happening. And she had no real problem with it. That made her tremendously nervous.

"You know," she said, and she really said it, "I think I can take a nap now." And she lay down and did.

There were elastic hair ties waiting for her on the desk the next day, or however long it was. She presumed someone was reading her journal, and so after very, very carefully tying off her hair into two ponytails once more, she picked up the pencil with her right ponytail and wrote:

"Thank you for the hair ties. Can I ask for a few more things to do? Also, if it's not too much trouble, can you tell me what's happening? I would consult my audio journal but I don't want to." She signed it.

She took inventory of the room, and added a few more requests: tiny food, her favorite carbo bev, water if the carbo bev was a no-go, and water for washing with (distinct from drinking, she wrote, underlying it). She played around with the geejaws--there were a few more, hooray!--and after a little geejaw assembling, she went back to her bed and slept.

There was no carbo bev and no tiny food, but there was a water bucket and soap, and feeling better about doing so, she stripped and got to cleaning. She noticed that it was not just her ever-hidden arms that were ghostly pale; her whole body was much paler than before. How and why she was so pale felt like another journal situation where to learn would be to die. So she just tried to forget. She toweled off (there had been a towel provided, too), hunt her towel on a newly-installed wall hook. There were a few changes of clothes provided, none of it remotely her style, and so she decided to do without until further notice or guests (something that happened quite a lot back in Dryl, where her only friends were robots that didn't care or workers who were used to being treated like robots that they didn't care).

She did not take a sip of the water before getting it soapy. She was totally unconcerned with how much water she had in her, which she realized was strange. Maybe whoever was renovating her room in her sleep was hydrating and feeding her while she slept and not at any other time. She could believe that; once she had slept through an earthquake, and substantially more than once she had gone to bed with a full tray of tiny baked goods for tomorrow's breakfast and awoke to find they had been break-feasted on somehow in the hours of the dark. So there was that.  
In her journal that day, she wrote about a memory:

"The first time I woke up to find out I had eaten my tomorrow food today, I went to the nice baker lady I don't remember what her name is, and I asked if invisible gnomes had eaten the breakfast cupcakes while I was asleep. She pointed out that my face was covered in icing, and I said, ah, they must have rubbed the cupcakes on my face before eating them. Which was rude. It turned out I just eat in my sleep. Are you feeding me tiny food or am I not very picky when I'm asleep?

"P.S. we did have invisible gnomes but they only ate one of the waiters instead of cupcakes. They were easy to see when they were full of meat and so we killed them all. We are pretty sure they all died. I have my doubts. Are you an invisible gnome? Are there some in this room? If so, don't tell me, I don't want to think about it. Signed: Entrapta."

She swept the room for invisible gnomes, the thought now incapable of escaping her brain, and once she was done, went back to bed. She awoke to a faint, warm, and intriguing scent.

There was a little glass vial nested in a little device that, judging by the steam and the nature of the smell, was a warmer of some kind. There was a little note laying on top of her journal.

"I have been feeding you well. Please forgive me. The world has turned wrong and nothing is coming together as it should. I have in addition been quite cowardly. Please forgive me my indiscretions."

No signature. And she didn't exactly know how to guess the identity of someone based on handwriting or how they wrote. So she just turned her attention to the flask. She used a pair of tongs hanging off the warmer to lift it out, uncapped it, sniffed the contents, leaned her head back, tilted the hot flask into her mouth, and drank.

It was thick, like syrup, but it didn't taste like syrup. It tasted like conductor wire and cheap nails, but in a good way. It engaged her senses in a way that regular syrup didn't, which was a hell of a thing given how much syrup enlivened her life. She drank it all without pause and felt her teeth start to twitch.

It was not a twitch like they were going loose. It was a twitch like they were stretching out--like a flexing muscle, only made of bone.

She touched her incisor with her tongue. It ended in a point. She was used to them ending in a blunt sort of point, such that when she bit her tongue on occasion it didn't punch a hole clean through her tongue like she was putting in a stud. Now her incisor came to a point that could, in her estimation, scrimshaw. With some care, she tested her other teeth. They weren't as sharp as her canines now were, all four of them, but all her teeth between her incisors came to points.

She remembered where she had tasted the contents of the beaker before, once when she had been hit in the mouth while talking. She'd bit her tongue, drawing blood. At the time, it did not thrill her to taste it.

Entrapta's intelligence was very specifically distributed. There were things she was spectacular at, and things she was not ideal at. But she had a feeling that something had gone very, very wrong.

She wrote a new entry: "Teeth sharp. Drank blood. Help."

And she walked back to the bed on her feet, her ponytails tying themselves into a braid with anxiety, and she lay down and she slept and her nightmares did not frighten her, upset her. She dream about pinning Catra down beneath her, hearing her screams turn to sputtering gurgles as she bit into her throat, feeling her movement slow and then stop at last as her warmth and life drained into Entrapta.

She awoke in total darkness. She could feel the air on her eyes; that was her only clue they were open. Her eyelids were the only thing she could move. Her arms, legs, her body, were distant, numb. As if she'd slept strangely on her neck and her entire body had gone to sleep.

Cold air on her bare eyes; numb emptiness in her arms, legs, chest, hips; and a hunger in her belly that was so great it too had teeth.

Sleep paralysis. You'll be fine, she thought. You've read all about this. It's a feeling like a goblin sitting on you, or a spooky blob at the foot of your bed looking at you. You'll get over it and then you'll be able to do something about the hungry feeling. Yep. That's how you're gonna do this, Entrapta.

Time passed and she could not move. More time passed and she could move only vaguely. She had nearly bent her elbow a fifteen degrees when she realized that she had been awake now, here, longer than she had ever been awake this past... how many days?

Three? Four?

Bereft of anything else she took mental inventory of this latest chapter in the life of the Princess of Dryl, and came to this conclusion: barring missing time, going by the average amount of time she typically spent on menial time-passing tasks back when she had ready access to a clock, she had experienced maybe an hour of wakefulness in however long she had been in this room. She had now been awake for what she estimated was around four hours.

What she hoped was four hours.

It was another eight hours before the door opened. There was some light, but not much, and there was movement.

"--sorry, sorry, _sorry,_" said that one skinny Hordesman Entrapta saw sometimes and she didn't remember his name. Cable? Campy? Kyle, that was it. He had an armful of blood beakers, and he fumbled to keep them all in hand as he approached Entrapta's bed. When he got within arm's reach of her bed the poor sucker dropped two, which shattered, and Entrapta could smell the spilled blood.

She sat up, muscles tearing in her lower back, and she grabbed a handful of beakers out of Kyle's arms. He yelped and fell back, dropping every other beaker. She didn't care; she yanked the caps off and poured all four flasks into her mouth at once.

One had been a revivifying experience. Four at once, after being trapped in her own body for an unguessable length of time, was like being born again. She gulped them down greedily, feeling her muscles grow wet and limber. There was a brief pain like a whole lot of shots all at once along her lower back, and then the pain was gone, and she was starving again.

She climbed out of bed and licked up the blood spilled on the floor, slurping greedily, kissing and sucking blood from the cold ground. She didn't even mind the many, many shards of glass, some pebbly, some like blades; she spat them out and kept drinking the floor clean.

Kyle was still there when she was done. She was faintly aware her mouth was smeared with blood and what she wagered would be a bunch of little cuts from kissing so much glass.

She sat on the floor, watching him. He watched her a little longer and, whimpering, closed his eyes, blushing furiously. The door was open and the light coming through was not the usual, uniform light of a Fright Zone hallway, but something dim and red.

In spite of that, she could see the fine lines of his veins crawling up from collar of his shirt, down into his hands from his sleeves. She saw the blooming capillaries that painted the blush on his cheeks.

So much blood.

"Hey," she said, and her voice was strange to her own ears. "Your name's Kyle, yeah?"

"Yeah," he said.

"You're a human, right? You've got blood? Like, in your body."

"I do," he said. He closed his eyes. "Do... do you want it, miss?"

She padded over to him on hands and knees. She sniffed his neck. Terrified sweat, Horde standard cleansing agent, and thin, anemic blood. Not enough iron, she realized, and she congratulated herself on knowing so much just from one good sniff.

"No," she said, with some effort. "Can you get more blood here? Like, regularly?"

"I... I'll ask Hordak, m'am..."

"You know Hordak? ... Stupid question. I mean, you talk to him? I thought people just kept food away from you and that was your job."

"It's been weird for everyone," Kyle said.

"I bet, man." She remembered at last: "Oh, uh. Do you know how long it's been?"

"Since what?"

"The whole end-of-the-universe thing."

"It's been five months, m'am."

"...Pardon?" Entrapta said.

"It's been five months since the World That Was," Kyle said. His eyes were still closed.

"...oh," she said. "Okay." She turned around and crawled back to bed. "I'll... I'll just pretend I dreamed that. You can go, I guess."

She closed her eyes. She heard Kyle speed out of the room, slamming the door behind him, which did not close all the way. She remembered she was still naked.

She awoke.

The lights were back on. The door was open. There were three blood vials on the desk.

She walked to the desk, drank her fill, and, feeling the call of sleep, pulled out the chair and sat with her back to the bed, facing the open door.

Okay, she thought. Today, I'm leaving.

The room was cold. It had been, on recollection, somewhat chilly before, the way everything in the Fright Zone was either just a little too cold or a little too warm. Now it was just cold. That didn't seem right. "Just cold" could be comfortable for someone.

All you have to do, she thought, and by "you" I mean "me," all I have to do is walk out that door and ask, hey, what's up? Or I'll get killed for leaving my prison. And, you know what? Maybe that'd be just fine.

Think, Entrapta. What could get me out of there?

She thought about Emily. Emily could be out there in danger.

The thought sat there like she had just declared the sky to be full of tiny distant lights like the stars you see when you get hit in the head real hard or stand up too fast. It was patently absurd and demonstrably false: Emily couldn't be in danger because Emily was just a stupid robot.

The shape of this thought made her somewhat alarmed. It was like thinking toys didn't come to life when she left the room, a thought that, too, suddenly felt juvenile and moronic. What do toys know about living?

Inspiration.

Entrapta, she thought, That is to say, me: you can stay in here with your brain saying all these terrible things like you're the one who thought them up, or you can leave, and occupy your thoughts with all the horrible things that could be out there.

Neither of these sounded great.

On one hand, she could be miserable in a small place she knew from top to bottom. On the other hand, she could be miserable in some place new where nothing was familiar and there was no retreat if the world became too much to bear. It was joining the Horde all over again.

Still, when she joined the Horde, she could futz around the Fright Zone until she found something cool to experiment with, and then when she was done, boom! she was part of the team, like that.

Sounds like your mind is made up then, she thought, and she stood up, and took a deep breath, and walked out of the room.

The lights were not red, though they were dimmer than normal. She stretched her ponytails, Lefty first, Righty next, and with the awkwardness of a toddler inexperienced at walking but lacking a fear of pain, she loped through the halls, looking for anything familiar at all.

It took a while before she saw anything moving. It was a Horde drone, its globe-shaped body painted with, she could smell, tragically dried blood. The blood was in two lines, one long, one short and crossing near the top. She vaguely recognized it as one of the alternative symbols of the Horde.

The drone's optics were fixed on her intently for longer than normal, as if it couldn't decide what she was. After a long moment, it finally turned away and tromped off. She slipped into the hallway it had vacated and tried to find anyone.

She found a window first. The Fright Zone was dimly lit, even compared to how dim it was usually lit with the thick clouds of smog choking out the moons. She could see movement in the gloom--things of great size somewhere out in the distance. Flashes of plasma fire split the night, but never for long.

Interesting. Very interesting.

She kept moving, sniffing the air, trying to find someone.

When she found someone, it was, naturally, Kyle, Rogelio, and Lonnie. Kyle was sleeping, his head in Rogelio's lap. Rogelio was nodding, but not asleep. He lifted his head as Entrapta approached. Lonnie was finishing up a protein bar, seated in a chair taken from somewhere and leaning in it, the front legs off the ground and the back pressed against the wall.  
Kyle's blood had a more full-bodied smell to it, and there was a little color in his cheeks; he had been eating better since she had gone to sleep. Lonnie, though...

"Oh, great," she said. "It's you." She threw aside her food wrapper. "You know how many times I had to pour blood into your gross-ass fangy mouth?"

Lonnie smelled _delicious_.

"How many times?" Entrapta said. "I don't remember you ever being there."

"Of course you don't," Lonnie said. "Every night for three months straight, that's how many. And now you can walk out of your room. What, are you thirsty?"

"Kinda," Entrapta said. Her teeth were twitching. Lonnie was angry--in fact, furious. She understood the subtle distinction now. She could smell it. So much blood so close to her skin, it was like cream seeping through the pores of a pastry.

She turned away, presumably to storm off. Entrapta grabbed her with both ponytails. "--the fuck!" Lonnie said. "What the fuck are--"

Entrapta smashed her head against the wall. Lonnie made a soft gurgling noise; blood seeped from her temple. It was around here that Entrapta realized that she was attacking Lonnie; her hair had acted independently of conscious thought.

Her hair dragged Lonnie closer. Entrapta's teeth grew out from her gums with a sensation she never could imagine would be pleasant. She opened her mouth wide, wider than should be possible, with a shocking pop. Lonnie kicked, pulling against Entrapta's hair, and she tried to say something, maybe even something apologetic. But Easy E had better things to do than listen to Lonnie and so she clamped her teeth down around her neck and bit.

She cried. Entrapta straight-up cried as she gulped down Lonnie's blood. Her body felt more like her own again. She felt more awake than she had in what had apparently been over five months. And if blood out of a bottle had been headier than syrup, blood straight from the tap was headier than chocolate. She relinquished control from her ponytails and held Lonnie in her arms, drinking away.

Powerful hands pressed into the sides of her head, re-distending her jaws; Lonnie fell from her mouth, and Kyle (?!) finished dragging her away. She thwipped a ponytail at Lonnie, just barely missing, and only then did she realize what she had done.

"...huh," Entrapta said.

Rogelio took her by the base of her hair and picked her up, keeping her away from Lonnie as Kyle worked her over with a medigel spray. Lonnie was on the ground, ashen, unfocused. Her neck injuries fizzed and popped as the medigel sealed her up.

That was me, Entrapta thought. I nearly killed her.

She licked her lips, tasting Lonnie's still-hot blood, and felt a pang of regret that she had not drunk all of it.

Kyle propped Lonnie up against the wall. She struggled to keep her eyes open and trained on Entrapta.

"Sorry," Entrapta said.

"_Fuck you,_" Lonnie said.

"...yeah, I can't argue with that," Entrapta said. "That was pretty mean." She swung side-to-side in Rogelio's grasp. "Can you let me go?"

Rogelio huffed.

"I don't know if he should while you're in drinking mood," Kyle said.

"Well, I don't want you to carry me around like a grocery bag," Entrapta said. "It doesn't hurt or anything but I feel... crap, I already said 'gorcery bag...'"

"Away," Lonnie said, her voice cracked and rough. "Get her away from me."

"There! She agrees!"

"No, _no no no no no,_" Lonnie said, "I did not. Away. Away."

"...Maybe Scorpia will know what to do with her," Kyle said, after some thinking.

Rogelio nodded, making a soft "aaaa" at the back of his throat.

Rogelio took her away from Lonnie. He found a vent, cracked the cover open, and pointed insistently. Entrapta slipped her freed ponytail into the vent; he pushed her up into it, and she vanished into the ventilation system. He slammed the vent cover back in place behind her.

Maybe it had been her absence of blood, but she somehow had not thought of climbing into the vents until after she had drunk deep from Lonnie. These felt comfortable, familiar, even if they little wider and full of dents than usual. She found why very quickly when she bumped into Scorpia crawling on elbows and knees through the ventilation, a flashlight attached to her head by a sturdy headband with a tactical rail.

"Oh, hey, Entrapt--aaa_aahhh_," Scorpia said, brightening and then darkening in an instant. "Oh, honey, your face is covered in blood and you're naked for some reason. Are you okay?"

"Yeah!" Entrapta said. "I mean, I have no idea if I actually am, but I'm intact and stuff." She licked her lips. "This is Lonnie's blood, if that's what you're wondering. Tastes good."

"Oh. Oh goodness. Is she alright?"

Entrapta shrugged. "I guess. Didn't drink all of her, anyway."

Scorpia sighed. "That's just how it is around here nowadays." She rested her head on her claws. "Things just haven't been right since the world nearly vanished into nothingness."

"Oh, mood," Entrapta said. "Do you know where Hordak is?"

Scorpia glanced up from her claws.

"What? You don't wanna tell me about what's going on either?"

"...not really," Scorpia said.

Entrapta whimpered. "Dammit. Dammit, dammit, I just wanna know what's going on. Like... the blood thing. And why I'm not feeling weird about... you know... the blood thing?"

Scorpia gently reached out one of her claws, reaching for Entrapta's shoulder. Entrapta sniffed and, judging by how Scorpia's face fell even further, made her displeasure well-known. "You smell bad," Entrapta said.

"It's been a long day," Scorpia said, a little hurt.

"No. Your blood. It smells bad."

"...half my blood is hemolymph," Scorpia said, very hurt. "I can't help it."

"You sure you can't?"

"I've tried. I can't."

"Well, at least you've tried." She sucked out a little blood that had got stuck between her teeth and swallowed the little congealed knot. "So, can anyone tell me what's going on?"

"Follow me," Scorpia said.

Scorpia was intolerably slow, so Entrapta did a lot of pushing her, especially uphill. Reaching their destination was like finally getting to chug a whole human's worth of blood after months of twilit existence.

Scorpia took a hard landing on a pile of cardboard boxes. Entrapta landed gracefully next to her. This room she knew: it was Hordak's throne room. Her heart laboriously chugged back to life after taking a post-drink nap.

Catra was sprawled on Hordak's throne. She was dozing, maybe. Her body was concealed by a black cape. There was a vicious bite on her neck, healed over. The tooth marks were deep and irregular.

"Hello?" Entrapta said.

"Careful, now," Scorpia said, putting a massive claw on her shoulder. "Be gentle with her. She's very... nap-prone. And she gets grumpy. You know how she gets grumpy."

"It's me, Catra," Entrapta said, just a little louder. "Can you hear me?"

Catra raised her head and opened her eyes. Where once her eyes had been a pale blue and a soft yellow, they were now black like drops of paint, her pupils lined with a red in a shade she would have no concept of: that of a solar eclipse.

"Hey, Entrapta," she said. There was no love in that voice.

"Hi-i-i, Catra," Entrapta said, feeling small in her gaze. "Where's Hordak?"

Catra's lips parted. It was technically a smile, but her smile looked like broken glass. "So glad you asked."

She slinked out of Hordak's throne, wrapped in her coat. She started down the steps, slowly, deliberately. "Start from the beginning, minion."

Entrapta felt Scorpia tremble. After a long moment and Catra's stare shifting to her, she cleared her throat and spoke. "We-ll. The day you tried to stop Catra from ending the world, and she ended the world anyway, and she also put you on a transport to Beast Island after tasering you--"

"She did what?" Entrapta said.

"Put you on a transport to Beast Island," Catra said. "When the universe un-ended, Hordak was pretty pissed at losing. When he found out you were on the way to Beast Island, well, he intervened."

"He got you back home!" Scorpia said. "Before the transport was halfway there, even! Boy, that was... scary. He was really angry at, like, everybody."

"M-hm." She stood in front of Entrapta, looking down on her. Suddenly she felt quite small. She felt Scorpia step away from her, walking a short distance away. "So, Hordak, he was at a real impasse. He didn't want to exile you. He didn't want to kill you. But he couldn't trust you. So he decided to ensure your loyalty."

Entrapta blinked.

Catra put her hand on her head--the feeling was electric, a static sting--and turned it. Scorpia was standing behind her with a mirror in her hands.

In the mirror she saw that her face was no less shockingly pale than the rest of her body. She also saw the prominent, nasty-looking bite scar on her neck, the oily black and dying-star red of her eyes.

"And then he turned you on me," Catra said, kneeling besides Entrapta. "We're like sisters. Isn't that sweet."

"Why isn't he here?" Entrapta said. She was crying. Her tears were streaks of black down her ghostly cheeks.

"Well, one, the Princess Alliance has been kicking our ass. Two, you didn't take to being an alukah all that well, so you've been down longer than you've been up--like a big ol' baby in a womb of a room." She gently slapped Entrapta. "So, one day, when he was exhausted, and I was full of blood and really, _really_ pissed off..."

She pulled aside her cape. She wore an armored breastplate now; embedded over her heart was Hordak's face. The bony plates were scratched, yellowed, the edges of his mouth and eye sockets scorched.

Entrapta made a little sound. She reached to touch Hordak's face; Catra seized her hand and clenched tight.

"I killed him," Catra said. "I drank his blood, staked him, burned him. Kicked Imp to death like the lapdog he was. _God is dead_. Now _I'm_ God." She licked Entrapta's ear. "You feel it, don't you? Like you're a bug beneath my heel."

Entrapta nodded. Her heart was stirring again. She was aroused, hopeful, her skin pining for Catra's touch, and she felt disgusting for it. She had worried about not feeling shame for what she did to Lonnie; now the shame was real and vulgar and vivid. Scorpia turned aside the mirror, looking ashamed.

"Hordak was your master," Catra said. "I got his power when I drained him dry. So now you're my pet." She brought her free wrist to her mouth and bit down; blood flowed freely. "'For this is My blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.'" She held the wound in front of Entrapta's face. She had been full; now the sight of Catra's blood made her ravenous.

"Drink me, whore," Catra whispered.

Entrapta closed her eyes, licked the punctured vein, then kissed it and suckled.

Blood in a tube had been a feast for the senses. Blood from Lonnie's veins was ambrosia. Catra's blood was a needle of refined opium straight to the brain.

Catra pulled her wrist away far too soon, and she kept Entrapta from lunging for the withdrawing wrist. Catra she held her hand down, letting blood trickle into her palm, and then she smeared it across Entrapta's face.

Entrapta whimpered. It was too much stimulation. Too much contact. Too much everything. She lowered herself to the ground, and Catra followed her.

"Catra," Entrapta said, eyes closed, tongue as hidden from her lips as she could manage, "I don't want to feel like this. Please, make it stop. Can you make it stop?"

"Don't wanna," Catra said, laying on top of her. She could feel the impression of Hordak's face press into her chest; she made an awful sound, some cry that had no name. "Come on now, Entrapta. Don't be afraid. You'll have time to be scared later. It's just you and me now. You and God..."

The door to the throne room opened. Catra's face filled Entrapta's vision, but she heard Scorpia say, "Oh, hey, Lonnie. I'm sorry, but Catra's really busy right now, and..."

Catra looked up. "Lonnie, huh."

"Yeah, it's me," Lonnie said. Her voice was still raspy. "Entrapta tried to fucking kill me a minute ago. You know that?"

"Yeah," Scorpia said.

"I can smell your blood on her breath," Catra said, pinching Entrapta's cheek. "So, yes."

"Great. And I see you're doing something about it, so... goodbye."

"I am," Catra said. She padded away from Entrapta on all fours, her claws popped and clicking on the floor.

"...what the fuck are you--" Lonnie said, and Catra was on her, pouncing from across the room and knocking her to the ground. Lonnie screamed, gurgled as Catra lifted her up by the collar, hoisting her over her shoulder. She walked back over to Entrapta, as burdened by Lonnie as she would be by a t-shirt. She threw the Hordesman to the ground by Entrapta; she hit the ground hard, knocking the breath out of her.

Lonnie scrambled away from her, but Entrapta seized her leg with a ponytail and, with that dreamy lack of control she felt before, picked her up and slammed her into the ground, once, twice. She lifted herself up and over and onto Lonnie, who was crying.

"'I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of life freely,'" Catra said, satisfied. "_Drink_, whore. God wills it."

"Please..." Lonnie said. Her plea turned at once into choked sobs.

"Watch," Catra said. She heard Scorpia shuffle in place.

Entrapta felt her teeth ready to be use. She felt her jaw twitch violently, trying to force itself open. She was suddenly ravenous. Everything in her body wanted her to do this except her brain.

I just want to go back to sleep, Entrapta thought.

Lonnie closed her eyes.

Entrapta opened wide, bit down, and drank her fill.

* * *

_It's the reflection of my own hand_

_on the mirror that I touch_

\--The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, "[Varcolac](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spxl4By7TjI)"

**You Could Be The Varcolac**

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to Bearpigs and Midnight Echoes for helping with this fic!
> 
> The fake title comes from the "germ" of the actual title song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4ACQ17UeEk


End file.
